Threat aspect

I have until recently assumed that the extra AP from Aspect of the Beast would compensate for the lost aggro from growl but after a little testing it appears I may have been wrong.

I would like to find out whether Thunderstomp scales with the Pet Spell power (which scales with hunter RAP) or Melee AP of the pet?

It would seem to me that Hawk is the correct aspect for tanking threat generation, am I correct in this?

I made a post about this on the 3.1 PTR forum a while back in the hopes that AotB would be changed to something useful, but unfortunately when the PTR forum goes down the post disappears.

Depending on your gear, the AP gain your pet inherits through you from Dragonhawk, especially if you have Aspect Mastery, would be within single digits of the pet AP granted by Aspect of the Beast. That plus the fact that pet gain bonus threat on growl based on the hunter's AP means that the majority of the time Dragonhawk will be better.

Depending on the pet, Dragonhawk can be far and away better than Beast. However, *also* depending on the pet, the opposite can happen. Observe a comparison done with Panzer, done in my DPS spec (AKA no bonuses to either aspect) and without any pet talents:

DAMAGE
No Aspect: 478-513
Aspect Of The Beast: 519-554
Aspect Of The Dragonhawk: 491-526

ATP
No Aspect: 2189
Aspect Of The Beast: 2408
Aspect Of The Hawk: 2258

Spell Bonus
No Aspect: +565
Aspect Of The Beast: +565 (!)
Aspect Of The Hawk: +604

So if your pet gains its damage from spell power, rather than through physical attack, Aspect Of The (Dragon)Hawk is very definitely the way you want to go. However, if your pet is physical damage, as many are, I believe that Aspect Of The Beast is a clear winner.

The major problem with this is that the major sources of threat are growl, thunderstomp and MC (Intimidation is static so we'll ignore it).

Unfortunately all of these scale only with the hunter's RAP and not with the pet's AP at all. From what I have observed pet physical attacks generate an insignificant amount of threat. Compare the threat generation of ferocity pets with high AP with and without growl on.

This is why I believe AotB is next to useless for anything but (and this is debatable) WSG flag carries and the odd EotB gimmick in PvP.

looks like we need to look into the mechanics and scaling threat of all these moves. I dont know if thats something that you are working on durante, but thats definitely something we need to understand in depth to make good choices for talents, abilities, and gear.

Doug wrote:From what I have observed pet physical attacks generate an insignificant amount of threat.

I am going to have to make a small argument for this one. Compared to Growl/Thunderstomp/Taunt, yes. The amount gained by a physical attack is insignificant. However, that 'insignificant amount' is still piling up on one target, and especially if your pet is attacking swiftly and often, will gain in numbers noticeably. I'm no Theorycrafter to be able to spout off exact Threat numbers, but I know that if my pet's Focus Dump is turned off, and they are just being allowed to use Growl, the aggro-gain on my side is very noticeable. With Thunderstomp as well as Growl, it's not as noticeable any more, but every bit helps. Especially if your pet is being given time to build threat.

Now, am I going to turn Growl off and go instead with physical? Hell no. Nor would I do the same with Thunderstomp. I am, however, going to argue that the physical damage is completely worthless.

Like Ihlos said, I'd love to know the scaling for the different abilities and hunter's stats. An estimate could probably be gotten by putting a naked hunter and naked pet on an enemy, then one with armor/talents/whatever.

That would make for a good estimate, maybe at four differnt levels of ap, or maybe just buying up some pure attack power greens of the AH to isolate the ap gain, and putting them on a nakey hunter peice by peice.

You can get a feel for it already by simply looking at the known scalings:

With your RAP - Growl, Thunderstomp, MD, Pet AP

With Pet AP - Physical Attacks, Focus Dump

Looking at it this way makes it clear that there is no possible scenario where foregoing RAP for anything but ginormous swathes of pet AP would be of any use. Your pet would have to manage upwards of 2k dps through physical attacks and focus dump alone for it to even begin to compete for threat in that regard.

One possible exception may be while you have BW up, it might just be worthwhile to Aspect hop at that time?

I am doing some testing on Cavedweller worgs to get a sense for this:
1) AotH only melee attacks: ~200TPS
2) AotB only melee attacks: ~250TPS
3) AotH +growl: ~800TPS
4) AotB +growl: ~750TPS
5) AotH +TS: ~300TPS (they die very quickly though)
6) AotB +TS: ~400TPS

Swapped to the Woms at this point
7) AotH +growl +TS: ~900TPS
8 ) AotB +growl + TS: ~700TPS

Conclusion: Use mobs with better health pools. But it appears that Straight Melee attacks give more single target threat than TS does O.O This means that the croc would probably like AotB quite a fair bit. It also appears that threat from melee scales better with pet AP than TS does with RAP.

This is indeed something I'm working on, and since it came up I could use a little help with having something verified and need some help figuring something out.

I found a formula for how Growl's scaling worked just before WotLK, so I've updated the base threat to that shown on Wowhead for the level 80 Growl and updated the AP threshold for level 80, but confirmation that the formula hasn't changed further would be great.

(Base Threat + (Hunter AP - AP Threshold)*1.25) *(1 + Points in Guard Dog * .1) = Threat/Growl
Base Threat being 1234 and the AP Threshold being 1260 at level 80.

The other thing is the additional threat for Thunderstomp. Wowhead doesn't have anything listen in the spell effects for additional threat effect, and I haven't been able to find any formulas for it. It'd be great if someone can dig something up or perhaps find some sort of addon that parses out the threat caused by individual attacks instead of only total threat against a mob.

what is the ap threshold? is that the point at which more ap actually gives you more threat? Thats what it seems to be from the formula.

The AP threshold is the point above which any additional Hunter AP will increase the threat generated by Growl.

http://petopia.brashendeavors.net/html/guides/stats_growlthreat.php is where I found the formula initially, but now that I reread it I'm realizing I messed up my threshold calculation.

Edit: Since the formula for the AP threshold changes above level 60 according to the article, any help deciphering what that is would be great. It'd probably be pretty easy if I had a reliable way of measuring exactly how much threat each growl generated beyond just trying to read the numbers off Omen.

I had thought about this as well. Ihlos here is a really great write up on growl by petopia understanding growl threat.

I just have to ask if you used the 17.5*pet level -140 to get 1260 AP theshold as it says in this article that it changes at 60 and jumps quite a bit. I fear it might still be on the same path upwards as far as a theshold. This is an old article but i think it still describes growl very well.

Thats exactly what I did. Thats what I get for doing most of this work late at night.

Maybe we ask mania how she came up with the formula.

For reading off omen, you can have omen display exact numbers and make a macro to only cast growl. If that's not precise enough then maybe we need to ask mania. She loves testing, but she may not have time.

I have the day off tomorrow so i'll see if i can come up with some growl numbers using omen, I am thinking of several things i could try.

The sub-60 forumla is RAP Threshold = 17.5 * Pet Level - 140

The level 70 Threshold is 1955-1959, which would be almost exactly 30 * Pet Level - 140. Perhaps this is the formula for over 70.

That would make the 80 RAP Threshold 2260 and the overall formula for a level 80: (1234 + (Hunter AP - 2260)*1.25) *(1 + Points in Guard Dog * .1) = Threat/Growl

I can't log in to test this ATM, but if someone could give it a shot I'd be grateful.

This is great news though. It means that RAP scales pretty decently into threat for our pet. It also means that with the Int -> AP talent....Agility, Intellect, and AP all contribute to the threat thats ticking each growl. No wonder my threat sucked so much when I stacked too much stam.

I'm really getting excited here. If we can pin down all the ways our stats affect threat, we can make a weight-formula and rank gear by it. Unfortunately Survivability vs Threat is hard to weight, but we can make much better informed choices on tanking gear.

Crit is going to be a little harder to quantify. Gftt and Cobra strikes procs are somewhat straightforward, but require some simplification. Extra threat from crits during MD would have to be normalized. Im sure there are other issues too, so alot of thought will have to be put in.

Hit is what it is, its great until you get to the cap and then its useless.

The other stats found on gear commonly like armor pen and haste can be ignored, for the most part.


I just thought of another question, does growl have the ability to miss? If so, is that based of hit?

I just noticed something interesting. My base RAP is 1085 according to the armory.

1234 + 1085 = 2319

Thats pretty close to what you are saying the threshold is. It makes sense this way, your base ap doesnt count, and then your ap is added as threat, unless you are under this cap, in which case you are bumped up to the threshold.

It may be that the stat window doesnt report this number exactly, no surprise there. Or maybe the threshold is 2319, i dunno, just thought id throw that out there.

Edit: Ok so i had another thought, your formula is basically saying that we get 1.25 * 1.2 extra threat from ap over the cap, or 1.5 threat per point of AP. So it really puts a buff like Might into perspective. Thats an additional 235 TPS just from growl.

Once this formula is pinned down, and thunderstomp, we can calculate the bonus damage the pet gets from ap and try to come up with a RAP -> Pet threat ratio, which will really help us with gearing choices.

Doesn't exactly work that way. the 1234 number is the base amount of threat growl will provide. If you are over the AP threshold number you start gaining threat at a rate of 1.25 times the amount you are over by. taking this 2440 number, in your case your first 1175 (2440-1085) points of AP would do nothing to growl. After you would see 1.25 more threat per AP.


Of course guard dog adds more threat to both the base and the bonus (i'm assuming).

It seems we are just saying the same thing different ways. Let me try a different way

What im proposing is that:
You get nothing for your base RAP.
If you are under the cap (for this theory the cap is base RAP + 1234) then you get 1234.
If you are over the cap, you get more.

Does this contradict what you are saying?

Here's an interesting twist:

I was testing Xerxes my Warp Stalker with both 2/2 SB (silverback) and 3/3 SC (spiked collar) and noticed that oddly enough the SB build generated substatially more threat over a period of time (i.e. it maitained a higher TPS).

This may have just been fluke but it seems to make that sense that the healing done would add to threat generated by growl (is it 1/2 threat for heals?). What's more, this would be AoE threat and would scale with Stamina and so be beneficial in a stamina build.

I am going to carry on testing this little theory, but I suppose it really hinges on the scaling of TS and Growl with RAP vs, the scaling of SB with Stamina. Likely RAP will win out, but it is intruiging.

So you are saying that you think that Silver back generates threat? healing and threat? thats good stuff right there. Im going to test this out. It would be super easy to isolate too, we know mend pet doesnt give the pet aggro, but the hunter.

To test this just let you pet get hit and see if the healing from silverback ups threat on omen.

To test it out, run in and aggro 2 mobs with the hunter. Put your pet on growl only on one mob. If the other mob goes to the pet when he uses growl we will know that it generates threat.

That's a great idea I'll try it now.

Yes, it only looks like it's providing about 50-60 TPS though. Pet health is 20k and the heal from growl is about 650 per tick, the threat per tick looks to about 100-150.

I had Xerxes on the other mob (using the first level 80's in normal HoL) no Thunderstomp and no mend pet, i only did one auto attack on the test mob. Xerxes got it off me before I needed to FD at 2 HP.

Whithout TS it appears that the threat gain from both 1/3 and 2/3 Spiked Collar is marginal at best, of the same order as SB. Even with TS I am seeing similar ranges, I just ran a whole test where I only provided a kill shot on the first mob in Hol (the other was iced for the duration).

Running the same test on the remaining mob with 2/2 SB the numbers were virtually indistinguishable, if anything appearing slightly higher to my biased eyes, I also ramped up Spiked Collar during the first test so I didn't have as long a series with 2/3 SC up.

The major confounding factor here is the fact that TS scales with AP and can crit (I wasn't proccing Cobra strikes or using KC) while SB scales with Stam and HP and cannot crit. From what I remember SB gives about 50 health per tick for every additional 1000HP on the pet meaning that the threat generated is about 10 per tick per 1000 health (excuse my back of envelope calculations). What would the AP scaling amount to if pet crits do if pets do 2xDamage over normal TS's?

Overall this seems a very interesting option. Silverback can be very significant over longer fights from a survivability perspective, on my warp stalker I am able to easily solo those first two HoL mobs individually with SB but my healing cannot keep up without it (i.e. using the points for Spiked Collar).

This is highly significant also because it allows the possibility of actually getting higher TPS by running a stamina build, which also improves stamina scaling, over a threat build (with 3/3 careful aim).